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Vegas' Drunk Ramble - The Drought Demon
2 - August 2015, GM: Mutu, Hunters: Vegas, Cobalt, Charlie, Jackie and Jordan, Player: Chloe Roanoke Island ...cont…. Oh man, and speaking of family time. I have ''tell you about the next time I caught up with Charlie. Arcadia put out a call for hunters at Pine Mountain Lake in California, an easy day drive away from our apartment in Las Vegas. The lake is in a town of empty holidays homes and it just so happens that I have a friend with access to a house in the area. So I pack up Jackie and we head off for a week of sun, lake sports and maybe just a spot of monster hunting. We go to meet up with the other hunters. Jordan Summers (a PI), Cobalt and….''Charlie. Now, besides a little ancestor killing, there’s really nothing too wrong with Charlie. But Charlie is fairly stressful even on a good day….and when she’s round Jackie, well, we have Rollo to deal with. So, I think it’s pretty obvious why my main motivation for that afternoon was to get as much steak into my little nibling as possible before we set out off on the hunt. I head down to a large restaurant down near where the waterfront of the lake used to be and, with a little palm greasing, manage to get a table... Significant palm greasing, actually, considering our party included a man in a snow jacket with a forehead tattoo. So I buy everyone lunch, including a T-bone for Charlie. During lunch I manage to glean, from the Maitre’D and nearby diners, that the lake level has been decreasing steadily since the drought started nearly 4 months ago and that it’s now nearly 8 metres lower than expected this time of year. Thanks to Cobalt arriving partway through lunch, the entire restaurant manages to glean that we’re here to solve the mystery of the lake and to fight monsters. Luckily, he’s near the bar so everyone just looks in the other direction and judges without comment. There’s an area on the water that Jackie and Jordan identify as having a heap more bad energy than the rest of the lake so on the way out I get the Maitre’D to rent us a boat and some scuba gear. It costs more than I usually spend in a month but I’m definitely not keen for just swimming out into the lake. I wouldn’t usually call myself a pessimist but I was hoping to keep "taking a dip in the lake" as our Plan B for when the thing in the lake inevitably attacked the boat. So I drive us out onto the lake. Charlie morphs out into were-bear to enjoy the feeling of wind against her fur and Jackie is quietly smiling near the back of the boat. It’s actually kinda nice, for a few minutes anyway, pretending to just be a bunch of rich idiots out with their boat. But then we get to the focus of the bad energy. And somehow, through definitely absolutely no fault of the driver, the boat tips over and we all end up in the water. Now I’m not a weak willed individual - I once went head to head with Anders Nygaard, the former head of the Las Vegas crime circuit, and come out top using nothing but my razor-sharp rhetoric - but even I'' get spooked at this, right? We need out of the water, ''now. So Jordan does what every sane ice bender would do in this situation and freezes us in to said water. It takes a lot more time - and most people end up in the water at least once more - but we make it back into the boat. It’s a slow ride back to shore with the boat up to the armpits in water and people take the chance to reminisce about the amount of stuff now at the bottom of the lake - a bunch of scuba gear, Cobalt’s favourite hunting rifle and the handbag of meat that Charlie had with her for snacks. We park the boat at an out-of-the-way cove and head back to the house for a bit of first aid. Jordan stays behind to cast an invisibility shield on the boat and then to keep tabs on our invisible boat so I don’t have to lose any more of my security deposit. On the way home, Charlie starts whining about how she hasn’t had any meat in, like, an hour. There’s no shops nearby and the only thing left in the house is some tinned foie gras because Charlie raided the fridge freezer before we left for the lake earlier. So she turns on the closest flesh based lifeform - which just so happens to be me. Look, I don’t really feel like going over the next bit. But let’s just say that Jackie and Charlie aren’t in any danger of becoming friends any time soon. So, I’m finally starting on the first aid when I hear the helicopters. Probably the police, considering Cobalt just discharged a shotgun in the middle of a neighbourhood of WASPs - and I doubt that St Bernard died quietly either…. So we leg it. And make it about... 50 metres. I managed to convince them that the perpetrator is still in the house - with large clawmarks down the side of my face it’s not exactly difficult - and Charlie knocks out the poor guy left to look after us. We escape. We arrive back to where Jordan is, jumping on the still invisible boat while Jackie uses her telepathy to direct the helicopters away from us. Ok so there’s a big research montage in here. Jordan used our connection to the items at the bottom of the lake to get a look at this big dark tentacled being and we head off to San Francisco to get an idea of what we’re up against. It turns out it’s a water based demon - likely a drought demon. And that means Jordan will be able to summon it to us - somewhere on land preferably. We also completely total the ‘71 Challenger's suspension. All typical Tuesday night stuff, right? So we figure the best place to go head to head with this demon is out in the area of desert just outside of Modesto. We set up an enchanted circle in a place where - assuming the demon heads directly towards us, which they usually do, it shouldn’t run over too many houses...only part of a Bald Eagle reserve. As a bonus, it looks like it is gonna run over the house we just trashed which will only make my conversation with Garotte Pete easier. Cards on the table, the guy wasn’t really my friend, he just owed me a favour ….even still, I kinda had to twist his arm to get the house. In my old line of business, people look at a lounge covered in blood and they get a pretty good idea what went down and who to blame. On the other hand, they look at several houses that appear to have been taken out by a massive bowling ball….they’re less likely to assume it’s your fault. Not that this influenced my plan at all. So Jordan summons the thing and we wait. And wait. And three hours later it finally shows up - having walked the entire way - and steps into the binding circle we’d set up. And, so I thought we had a plan, right? Trap the thing and then get out of the way of the tentacles? So I start running. And the tentacles are really long right? So I get fully out of range and turn around…. Just in time to see Charlie deal the killing blow. They both ended up living with me for a while after that. Which went about as well as you can guess - anyway - so yeah, my pockets were a whole lot lighter after that particular mystery but hey - you can’t take it with you, right? Next round’s on me! A large water-based demon was sitting at the bottom of a lake in California causing the level of the lake to drop significantly presumably through ingesting or otherwise using up the water as part of its living process. A large water-based demon is now most likely decomposing slightly below ground level in an arbitrary location somewhere in the Californian desert.